Internationale Neerlandistiek - Volume 57, Issue 1, 2019

The Diary of Anne Frank, written between 1942 and 1944 while she was in hiding with her family in Amsterdam, has been translated in more than 70 languages. Not only the editorial history but also the history of the translations and the reception of Anne Frank’s Diary abroad are complex stories. In this article we will outline how the German translation in the fifties – first in West Germany in 1950 and seven years later in the German Democratic Republic – functioned as a transit port for the Russian translation that came out in 1960. Furthermore we will illustrate how both the history of the East German and the Russian publication bear traces of the political and ideological context in which they came into being and how they are marked by their respective specific memory culture.

Therefore we investigate the first West German translation made by a non-professional translator and the Russian translation from 1960, the role of the reviews (Gutachten), prefaces and afterwords, and we read these against the backdrop of the political and historical developments. Also, the role of adaptations comes up: the Broadway theatrical production staged in West and East Germany in 1956 helped spread the story of Anne Frank amongst German readers, while in the Soviet Union it was the book publication of her Diary that inspired poets and composers.

In the so-called ‘Leseland DDR’ anthologies of foreign literature played an exceptionally important part in making available foreign texts and in disclosing new literary worlds to the GDR reading public. Moreover, these anthologies could function as a proving ground for introducing new authors and literary schools without censorial objection.

The anthologies contain peritexts by the publisher or editor – mainly blurbs and afterwords – that focus on the representative and innovative character of the texts and inform about the selection of authors, the general themes and content, the aesthetic quality and – in case of anthologies from western countries – provide critical remarks on the condemnable developments in capitalist societies.

In this article I investigate and compare four GDR anthologies of literature from the Netherlands and Flanders, all published between 1976 and 1984. This will make clear that the ideological comments after the cultural and political ‘Wende’ in the GDR at the beginning of the seventies can no longer be considered obligatory bows for the censorial authorities.

The communist poet Marc Braet (1925-1923) has been a major mediator between the East and the West during the postwar period, especially between the German Democratic Republic and Belgium. In the first place, I investigate how different forms of cultural transfer from the GDR to Belgium came about, and which role Braet played in them, particularly with regard to an anthology of GDR poets, De groene bomen (1971, [The Green Trees]). Secondly, I present a case that in agreement with the histoire croisée sheds light on the transfer in the opposite direction, an anthology with German translations of Braet’s poems. The translation by Hans Joachim Schädlich came out as Mein endlos beflaggtes Schiff, a publication by Volk und Welt that kept dragging on from 1975 until 1981. A reconstruction of the whole publication process based on research of the records gives an impression of the way in which the network of translators, proof readers and officials worked. Finally, I compare this publication with a Russian anthology of poems by Braet in order to highlight the transnational dimension of the cultural transfer and the important role the German language played in this process. On the one hand the different cases show how literature was ideologically instrumentalized, and on the other hand the case of Braet illustrates how a steered reception can have unexpected consequences, such as a very early and remarkably profetical selection of valuable GDR poetry in translation.